Surgical and dental applications of ultrashort pulse lasers

Employing new advances in the technology of ultrashort pulse lasers, a laser parameter regime which could provide hard tissue interaction characteristics that are superior to conventional mechanical drill technology has now been identified. The major advantages of this tissue ablation method are: 1) efficient ablation; 2) minimization of collateral damage; 3) ablation thresholds and ablation rates which are relatively insensitive to tissue type; 4) high control over ablation depth is achievable because only a small amount of tissue is ablated per pulse; 5) low operation noise level; and finally, 6) precise spatial control due to the multiphoton nature of the interaction. In our experiments, laser pulses generated by a 1053 nm Ti:sapphire chirped pulse amplifier (CPA) system were used. Seed pulses of 100 fs from a Kerr-lens mode locked, Ti:sapphire oscillator were stretched to 1 ns in a four-pass, single-grating pulse stretcher. We have demonstrated negligible collateral damage and highly efficient ablation rates per pulse.